Four short links: 29 January 2013

FISA Amendment Hits Non-Citizens — FISAAA essentially makes it lawful for the US to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in US Cloud providers. […] [A] US judiciary subcommittee on FISAAA in 2008 stated that the Fourth Amendment has no relevance to non-US persons. Americans, think about how you’d feel keeping your email, CRM, accounts, and presentations on Russian or Chinese servers given the trust you have in those regimes. That’s how the rest of the world feels about American-provided services. Which jurisdiction isn’t constantly into invasive snooping, yet still has great bandwidth?

Tim Berners-Lee Opposes Government Snooping — “The whole thing seems to me fraught with massive dangers and I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said in reply to a question about the Australian government’s data retention plan.

Google’s Approach to Government Requests for Information (Google Blog) — they’ve raised the dialogue about civil liberties by being so open about the requests for information they receive. Telcos and banks still regard these requests as a dirty secret that can’t be talked about, whereas Google gets headlines in NPR and CBS for it.

Open Internet Tools Project — supports and incubates a collection of free and open source projects that enable anonymous, secure, reliable, and unrestricted communication on the Internet. Its goal is to enable people to talk directly to each other without being censored, surveilled or restricted.